Adding Time Zones to Leads using Google’s API

Last Friday I sat down with one of UpCurve Cloud's engineers, Jeremiah Goyette, and he gave me the inside scoop on one of his most recent projects. Last week one of our customers was looking for a way to add time zone information to each of their leads. They needed an easier way to quickly determine if it is a good time to contact the lead. Jeremiah and the UpCurve Cloud team decided to create a custom time zone field using Google's API. In my interview below, you can learn more about the project, its framework, and the benefits it provided our customer and their sales team.

Q: Can you explain the project you are currently working on?A: Well, one of our customers came to us looking for a way to add time zone information to their leads module. Sometimes the sales team doesn’t have enough time to study a customer’s zip code or country code in order to know when is the best time to contact them. But with this custom time zone field, when a salesperson adds or saves a lead, Sugar automatically makes a query to Google and then adds the timezone based on the address given. This allows the salesperson to easily figure out when is the best time to touch base with the lead. To help make it even evident, we customized the field so that the time will be green during business hours and red when it’s after hours.

Q: How did you come up with this specific solution?A: Some of our engineers had a meeting to go over the requirements needed for the client's entire project. Once we got to this part of the project we decided we wanted to create a much cooler and more efficient time zone field than what the client originally requested. They just asked for a field to display the time zone, but we decided it would be more beneficial to display the local time, and to add color to indicate availability.

Q: Did you use any other applications besides Sugar? What software packages did you find the most helpful during this project?A: We used the Google Maps API to look up the coordinates of the address and to get the time zones. The API was central to our project since determining the time zone requires an intense amount of data.

Q: What did you really like about this project?A: I really liked how the benefits of this customization could immediately be noticed. As soon as we finished creating it, it was clear how much it would help our customer and simplify the process for their sales team.

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For more information about Jeremiah’s project or other customizations mentioned in this post, contact us today.